Despite the widespread contamination of wildlife and people and the discovery of harmful chemicals effects, there is a shocking lack of publicly available safety data on chemicals currently in use.

Most chemicals on the market and in everyday use have never been adequately assessed for their human and environmental safety.

By the end of the 1990s, some 100,000 chemicals had been registered in the EU with the European Inventory of Existing Commercial Chemical Substances, but very little is known about the toxicity of the vast majority of them. Only 14% of the highest production volume chemicals have a enough publicly available data to do even the most basic safety assessment.

Important environmental problems, such as ozone depletion and PCB contamination can be traced back to the failure to test and regulate chemicals properly.

Unborn children are being exposed in the womb to potentially harmful man-made chemicals